The Peter Hall Company's seventh successive summer residency in Bath gets off to a relatively quiet start with a double bill of Chekhov and Rattigan. There is more excitement to come later in the season in the shape of Shaw, Storey and Frayn, but what is striking about the opening programme is how Rattigan, in his contained emotion and tragi-comic tone, seems far more Chekhovian than Chekhov himself.

The truth is that Swansong is a flimsy one-acter, written in 1888, paying perverse homage to an elderly thespian in a manner that prefigures Harwood's The Dresser or Mamet's A Life in the Theatre. Chekhov's hero is, in fact, a 68-year-old comic actor who finds himself locked in a theatre and who, attended only by a prompter, dwells on impending death, the life unlived and memories of past glories. The best bits are the quotations from Aeschylus and Shakespeare, but the piece has nothing much to tell us other than that theatre is a house of dreams. It simply gives its main performer a chance to display a tattered grandeur and rueful pathos – which Peter Bowles dutifully does.

Bowles is used to infinitely better effect as the desiccated schoolmaster, Crocker-Harris, in Peter Hall's revival of Rattigan's 1948 play The Browning Version. As in the Chekhov, Bowles plays a man who confronts failure and disappointment: once a brilliant classical scholar, Crocker-Harris is now a despised teacher dubbed "the Himmler of the Lower Fifth". But the play shows how this apparently desolate figure is restored to life by two acts of kindness: a schoolboy's unexpected gift of Browning's translation of Agamemnon and the determination of a colleague, who happens to be his wife's former lover, to visit him in his semi-retirement.

What is always startling about Rattigan is his ability to suggest the yearning and sadness that lies behind the English mask of restraint. You see this in Crocker-Harris's sudden breakdown at the boy's gift. But Bowles has an equally powerful moment when, referring to a free-verse version of Agamemnon the teacher himself did as a young man, he says that it is, "like so many other things, lost for good". In that brief, poignant phrase you get a sense of the character's recognition of the failure of his marriage as well as the waste of his talent.

Candida Gubbins rightly plays Crocker-Harris's wife as a snob, equally doomed to disappointment, and Charles Edwards lends her sometime lover a quixotic compassion. But the main impression left by this very good production is of Rattigan's ability to turn English emotional reticence, of which he was often deeply critical, into a dramatic weapon.